The UK Foundation Industries (Glass, Metals, Cement, Ceramics, Bulk Chemicals and Paper), are worth £52B to the UK economy, produce 28 million tonnes of materials per year and account for 10% of the UK total CO2 emissions. These industries face major challenges in meeting the UK Government's legal commitment for 2050 to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 100% relative to 1990, as they are characterised by highly intensive use of both resources and energy. While all sectors are implementing steps to increase recycling and reuse of materials, they are at varying stages of creating road maps to zero carbon. These roadmaps depend on the switching of the national grid to low carbon energy supply based on green electricity and sustainable sources of hydrogen and biofuels along with carbon capture and storage solutions. Achievement of net zero carbon will also require innovations in product and process design and the adoption of circular economy and industrial symbiosis approaches via new business models, enabled as necessary by changes in national and global policies. Additionally, the Governments £4.7B National Productivity Investment Fund recognises the need for raising UK productivity across all industrial sectors to match best international standards. High levels of productivity coupled with low carbon strategies will contribute to creating a transformation of the foundation industry landscape, encouraging strategic retention of the industries in the UK, resilience against global supply chain shocks such as Covid-19 and providing quality jobs and a clean environment. The strategic importance of these industries to UK productivity and environmental targets has been acknowledged by the provision of £66M from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund to support a Transforming Foundation Industries cluster. Recognising that the individual sectors will face many common problems and opportunities, the TFI cluster will serve to encourage and facilitate a cross sectoral approach to the major challenges faced. As part of this funding an Academic Network Plus will be formed, to ensure the establishment of a vibrant community of academics and industry that can organise and collaborate to build disciplinary and interdisciplinary solutions to the major challenges. The Network Plus will serve as a basis to ensure that the ongoing £66M TFI programme is rolled out, underpinned by a portfolio of the best available UK interdisciplinary science, and informed by cross sectoral industry participation. Our network, initially drawn from eight UK universities, and over 30 industrial organisations will support the UK foundation industries by engaging with academia, industry, policy makers and non-governmental organisations to identify and address challenges and opportunities to co-develop and adopt transformative technologies, business models and working practices. Our expertise covers all six foundation industries, with relevant knowledge of materials, engineering, bulk chemicals, manufacturing, physical sciences, informatics, economics, circular economy and the arts & humanities. Through our programme of mini-projects, workshops, knowledge transfer, outreach and dissemination, the Network will test concepts and guide the development of innovative outcomes to help transform UK foundation industries. The Network will be inclusive across disciplines, embracing best practice in Knowledge Exchange from the Arts and Humanities, and inclusive of the whole UK academic and industrial communities, enabling access for all to the activity programme and project fund opportunities.

The Transforming the Foundation Industries Challenge has set out the background of the six foundation industries; cement, ceramics, chemicals, glass, metals and paper, which produce 28 Mt pa (75% of all materials in our economy) with a value of £52Bn but also create 10% of UK CO2 emissions. These materials industries are the root of all supply chains providing fundamental products into the industrial sector, often in vertically-integrated fashion. They have a number of common factors: they are water, resource and energy-intensive, often needing high temperature processing; they share processes such as grinding, heating and cooling; they produce high-volume, often pernicious waste streams, including heat; and they have low profit margins, making them vulnerable to energy cost changes and to foreign competition. Our Vision is to build a proactive, multidisciplinary research and practice driven Research and Innovation Hub that optimises the flows of all resources within and between the FIs. The Hub will work with communities where the industries are located to assist the UK in achieving its Net Zero 2050 targets, and transform these industries into modern manufactories which are non-polluting, resource efficient and attractive places to be employed. TransFIRe is a consortium of 20 investigators from 12 institutions, 49 companies and 14 NGO and government organisations related to the sectors, with expertise across the FIs as well as energy mapping, life cycle and sustainability, industrial symbiosis, computer science, AI and digital manufacturing, management, social science and technology transfer. TransFIRe will initially focus on three major challenges: 1 Transferring best practice - applying "Gentani": Across the FIs there are many processes that are similar, e.g. comminution, granulation, drying, cooling, heat exchange, materials transportation and handling. Using the philosophy Gentani (minimum resource needed to carry out a process) this research would benchmark and identify best practices considering resource efficiencies (energy, water etc.) and environmental impacts (dust, emissions etc.) across sectors and share information horizontally. 2 Where there's muck there's brass - creating new materials and process opportunities. Key to the transformation of our Foundation Industries will be development of smart, new materials and processes that enable cheaper, lower-energy and lower-carbon products. Through supporting a combination of fundamental research and focused technology development, the Hub will directly address these needs. For example, all sectors have material waste streams that could be used as raw materials for other sectors in the industrial landscape with little or no further processing. There is great potential to add more value by "upcycling" waste by further processes to develop new materials and alternative by-products from innovative processing technologies with less environmental impact. This requires novel industrial symbioses and relationships, sustainable and circular business models and governance arrangements. 3 Working with communities - co-development of new business and social enterprises. Large volumes of warm air and water are produced across the sectors, providing opportunities for low grade energy capture. Collaboratively with communities around FIs, we will identify the potential for co-located initiatives (district heating, market gardening etc.). This research will highlight issues of equality, diversity and inclusiveness, investigating the potential from societal, environmental, technical, business and governance perspectives. Added value to the project comes from the £3.5 M in-kind support of materials and equipment and use of manufacturing sites for real-life testing as well as a number of linked and aligned PhDs/EngDs from HEIs and partners This in-kind support will offer even greater return on investment and strongly embed the findings and operationalise them within the sector.

The DigitalMetal CDT is born out to meet a national, strategic need for training a new generation of technical leaders able to lead digital transformation of metals industry & its supply chain with the objective of increasing agility, productivity & international competitiveness of the metals industry in the UK. The metals industry is a vital component of the UK's manufacturing economy and makes a significant contribution to key strategic sectors such as construction, aerospace, automotive, energy, defence and medical, directly contributing £20bn to UK GDP, and underpins over £190bn manufacturing GDP. Without a new cadre of leaders in digital technologies, equipped to transform discoveries and breakthroughs in metals and manufacturing (M&M) technologies into products, the UK risks entering another cycle of world-leading innovation but losing the benefits arising from exploitation to more capable and better prepared global competitors. The evolution to Industry 4.0 and Materials 4.0 coupled with unprecedented opportunities of "big data" enable the uptake of artificial intelligence/deep learning (AI/DL) based solutions, making it feasible to implement zero-defects, right first-time manufacturing/zero-waste (ZDM/ZW) concepts and meet the environmental-, sustainable- and societal- challenges. However, to fully take advantage of these opportunities, two critical challenges must be addressed. First, as user-identified problems in the metals industry that spans domains (from discoveries in M&M to their up-scaling and deployment in high volume/value production), urgently needed a new breed of engineers with skills to traverse these domains by going beyond the classical PhD training, i.e., T-model signifying transferable skills and in-depth knowledge in a single domain, to a new Pi-model raining that is underpinned by transferable skills and in-depth knowledge that transverse across domains i.e.,: AI/DL and engineering (M&M) to enable rapid exploitation of discoveries in M&M. Second, while AI/DL domain provides data-driven correlation analysis critical for product performance and defect identification, it is insufficient for root cause analysis (causality). This necessitates training on integrating data-driven with physics-based models of product & production, which is currently lacking in the metals industry. The Midlands region, as the top contributor to UK Gross Value Added through metals and metal products, with world-leading companies, such as Rolls-Royce and Constellium, LEAR and their customers, underpinned through collaborations with the five Midlands universities: Birmingham, Leicester, Loughborough, Nottingham & Warwick, is uniquely positioned to integrate research and industry resources and train a new cadre of engineers & researchers on the Pi-model to address user-needs. Our vision is to train future leaders able to accelerate the exploitation of M&M discoveries using digital technology to enable defect-free, right first-time manufacturing at reduced costs, digitise to decarbonise, and implement fuel switching in metals manufacturing industry.

Incremental Sheet Forming (ISF) is a flexible, cost effective, energy and resource efficient process. It only requires a simple tool to deform the sheet material incrementally by moving the tool along a predefined tool path created directly from the CAD model of a product. Without using moulds, dies or heavy-duty forming machines, it is flexible to manufacture small-batch or customised sheet products with complex geometries. However, existing ISF processes cannot manufacture hard-to-form materials, such as high strength aluminium, magnesium and titanium alloys, because these materials have limited ductility at room temperature. This EPSRC follow-on project aims to build on the initial success of an EPSRC Adventurous Manufacturing grant (EP/T005254/1) in developing a rotational vibration assisted incremental sheet forming (RV-ISF) process to manufacture hard-to-form materials for industrial applications. The RV-ISF process is centred on a novel ISF tooling to generate low frequency and high amplitude vibration in ISF processing, which produces localised heating and material softening therefore improve the material ductility without the need of additional heating or extra energy input. By developing and implementing the novel tooling, RV-ISF experimental testing of a well-known hard-to-form material has demonstrated a 300% increase in forming depth, more than 70% reduction of average grain size through microstructure refinement, 20% improvement in average hardness and up to 37% reduction of average surface roughness. To capitalise the promising findings from the EPSRC Adventurous Manufacturing grant (EP/T005254/1), this follow-on project assembles a multidisciplinary team with expertise in flexible sheet forming, material science and plasticity, advanced manufacturing technologies, novel tooling and bespoke machine systems. The aim is to develop an in-depth understanding of the material deformation mechanisms under RV-ISF processing conditions and to use this new knowledge to expand the material types and products that can be successfully manufactured using this innovative process. In working with the project partners, the follow-on project aims to deliver a range of demonstrable products and to engage in dissemination activities for a swift translation of the developed flexible, cost effective and sustainable forming process into UK's medical, automotive, aerospace and nuclear industries.

Historically, the discovery, development and application of metals have set the pace for the evolution of human civilisation, driven the way that people live, and shaped our modern societies. Today, metals are the backbone of the global manufacturing industry and the fuel for economic growth. In the UK, the metals industry comprises 11,100 companies, employs 230,000 people, directly contributes £10.7bn to the UK GDP, and indirectly supports a further 750,000 employees and underpins some £200bn of UK GDP. As a foundation industry, it underpins the competitive position of every industrial sector, including aerospace, automotive, construction, electronics, defence and general engineering. However, extraction and processing of metals are very energy intensive and cause severe environmental damage: the extraction of seven major metals (Fe, Al, Cu, Pb, Mn, Ni and Zn) accounts for 15% of the global primary energy demand and 12% of the global GHG emission. In addition, metals can in theory be recycled infinitely without degradation, saving enormous amounts of energy and CO2 emission. For instance, compared with the extraction route, recycling of steel saves 85% of energy, 86% GHG emission, 40% water consumption and 76% water pollution. Moreover, metals are closely associated with resource scarcity and supply security, and this is particularly true for the UK, which relies almost 100% on the import of metals. The grand challenge facing the entire world is decoupling economic growth from environmental damage, in which metals have a critical role to play. Our vision is full metal circulation, in which the global demand for metallic materials will be met by the circulation of secondary metals through reduce, reuse, remanufacture (including repair and cascade), recycling and recovery. Full metal circulation represents a paradigm shift for metallurgical science, manufacturing technology and the industrial landscape, and more importantly will change completely the way we use natural resources. Full metal circulation means no more mining, no more metal extraction, and no more primary metals. We will make the best use of the metals that we already have. We propose to establish an Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centre, CircularMetal, to accelerate the transition from the current largely take-make-waste linear economy to full metal circulation. Our ambition is to make the UK the first country to realise full metal circulation (at least for the high-volume metals) by 2050. This will form an integral part of the government's efforts to double resource productivity and realise Net Zero by 2050. We have assembled a truly interdisciplinary academic team with a wide range of academic expertise, and a strong industrial consortium involving the full metals supply chain with a high level of financial support. We will conduct macro-economic analysis of metal flow to identify circularity gaps in the metals industry and to develop pathways, policies and regulations to bridge them; we will develop circular product design principles, circular business models and circular supply chain strategies to facilitate the transition to full metal circulation; we will develop circular alloys and circular manufacturing technologies to enable the transition to full metal circulation; and we will engage actively with the wider academic and industrial communities, policy makers and the general public to deliver the widest possible impact of full metal circulation. The CircularMetal centre will provide the capability and pathways to eliminate the need for metal extraction, and the estimated accumulative economic contribution to the UK could be over £100bn in the next 10 years.